One C. difficile death and two new cases at Guelph General Hospital

Guelph Mercury

GUELPH — A Guelph General Hospital patient died over the weekend with C. difficile he acquired at the facility. As well, the hospital confirmed Monday that it has two additional patients with hospital-acquired C. difficile.

“The cause of the death is being directly linked to C. difficile,” said Richard Ernst, the hospital’s president and chief executive. He noted the elderly victim, who tested positive earlier this month, was in hospital for serious medical conditions unrelated to the bacterium.

“This was a patient who contracted it while in hospital,” Ernst said, declining further information on the patient because of confidentiality.

It brings to two the number of Guelph General deaths connected to C. difficile, this year. An elderly patient died in June after contracting the illness.

The two new cases reported Monday are in addition to two cases Friday.

Guelph General’s incident-management team was to meet Monday over the developing C. diff outbreak. It was declared a week ago.

Ernst said there is no plan to stop the public from visiting patients “at this point in time.”

Groves Memorial Community Hospital in Fergus remains free of hospital-acquired C. difficile, president and chief executive Jerome Quenneville said Monday.

Guelph General declared an outbreak on July 5. That’s after discovering a combined 11 cases of hospital-acquired C. difficile in May and June, up from a more typical one or two cases a month. This brings to 15 the total to date since May.

The gastrointestinal bacterium can cause serious ailments such as severe diarrhea. It is particularly dangerous for ill or elderly patients.

Meredith Faires, a University of Guelph population medicine doctoral student who is doing a study on Clorstridium difficile, commended the local hospital’s approach to battling the spore-reproducing bug, which is generally spread by direct or indirect contact with infected feces.

The General has begun using a process it calls “terminal cleaning,” which entails double cleaning with sporicidal disinfectants any room vacated by a C. difficile patient.

Faires, who has probed hospital C. difficile infections since 2008, said other hospitals have used similar techniques.

“I believe it has helped,” Faires said.

C. difficile is a very hardy bacterium that must be physically removed from the hospital environment or killed, she continued. If not, “it can be in the environment for months.”

Some hospitals have added a third weapon to their anti-C. diff arsenal: removing any hospital surfaces in which the bacterium can lurk. That means, for example, discarding message corkboards and specific furniture that’s hard to disinfect, said Faires, who intends to submit her findings to scientific journals in a couple months.

Guelph is among seven hospitals fighting C. difficile, The Canadian Press reported Monday. But that’s down from 11 reported recently, after three hospitals were cleared of cases by provincial health authorities.